For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed, proprietary, hosted-only model.

Most applications of embedding models involve calculating thousands or even millions of embedding vectors and storing them for later comparison.

If your model is proprietary, the vendor is likely someday going to decide to stop offering that model. They'll have a better model to replace it, but you still need to pay to re-calculate those millions of stored existing vectors.

(In April 2024 OpenAI offered to "cover the financial cost of users re-embedding content with these new models" - https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-api-general-availability/ - but I don't think that's something we can rely on from every provider.)

Notably, I don't want to host the model myself. I'd much rather pay a provider for a hosted model while knowing that if they ever stop hosting it I can run the open weights version myself - or find another vendor who can do that for me.

Insects can pass the mirror test. But more to the point, viruses don't need a "self" to do what they do.

And goals can exist apart from biology (my fridge "wants" to keep the temperature in range, and exercises extreme self-discipline and consistency to achieve its goals!)

And neither are sensors needed: the dandelion seed "wants" to fly in the wind.

The only question is which way the gradient is pointing. Selection takes care of the rest.

On that note, ALife need not be human-like at all... we just really like making things in our own image :)

If AGI is "Attractions to Get Investments" then yes, it's happening

> Documents supplied to the Hamburg court indicated that Hanning was the go-between with the Israelis. According to media reports, these Hamburg court documents contained clues to his other business activity with classified BND information.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/10/06/former-ge...

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and western intelligence precedent (eg russian “illegals program”) is that when it’s Russia/China, it’s named.

So the omission here itself (and denial of Russia) is some additional speculative information, on top of his already known ties to Mossad.

This is the core error of understanding, and that same error leads to a great deal of bad Show HN’s as well:

Platforms want repeat business. Or, in classical retail cafe terms: Platforms want regulars.

Signing up for Reddit solely to self-promote something is indistinguishable from how one defines ‘spam’: unwanted promotional links delivered from reputation-free accounts. HN chooses to tolerate the Show HN flood to some degree because it’s classically of interest and open by design, but also comes with a dramatically more expensive human moderation burden that Reddit has decided they would rather not pay.

That I can summarize this post as “Self-promotion by unreputable or disingenuous participants is usually a bannable offense in online communities”, without having to even name whether it’s Reddit or HN or MeFi or RPG.net, suggests that this is much more a ‘fuck around and find out’ learning moment for the author than something of material interest to HN. Certainly there’s no surprise at the outcome: a competent anti-spam automation that triggered the first ban would have banned the domain regardless of which account is involved, to prevent swarm bot attacks that are well-known for some years now to webforum operators.

It's like you get a really good 'query planner' like a DB would give you, but for your notebooks/scripts/etc. Much better than pandas imo.

All aboard! We're racing to the bottom now.

  - A neutrino is an elementary subatomic particle. Neutrinos are produced by nuclear reactions inside stars, supernovae, radioactive decay. They are one of the most abundant particles in the universe.
  - Neutrinos are known as "ghost particles". They have 0 charge and near-zero mass. They only react with the weak nuclear force and gravity. Incredibly hard to detect. Trillions can pass through a whole planet without hitting a single atom!
  - Neutrinos give us a pristine snapshot into the origin of the universe. They have travelled billions of years and trillions of miles without interacting with anything. Unless...we catch them!
  - Ice Cube does this. Located in Antarctica, the project turns a cubic kilometer of ice into a neutrino detector. How? Scientists drilled boreholes 2.5km deep into the ice and placed 5000 optical detectors to catch a neutrino interaction.
  - When a neutrino, rarely, collides with an atom, it produces charged particles. In ice - not vacuum! - certain particles can travel faster than light. This produces something similar to a sonic boom. A faint, blue glow known as Cherenkov radiation (see it in action https://youtube.com/watch?v=hSuSG19Pcoc).
  - IceCube was first to detect neutrinos coming from outside the solar system, establishing the source of high energy cosmic radiation. It also opened a whole new chapter of neutrino astronomy.

Point by point:

> “OMG you can jailbreak it and get it to spill its VM”

This is the whole point; any content on the VM is yours. It runs in an isolated sandboxed VM separate from stored credentials etc; this is effectively your own computer. You don’t have to trick it.

> It collects dossiers on your contacts

These are more text files that live on your private VM, alongside memory.md, etc. Do you want your secretary to forget every person you contact every day?

> It accessed Messages without full disk access

This whole story never made sense or was substantiated. Full disk access is an OS level security boundary; the user had to switch this on.

> It sold some guys stuff for too cheap and gave out his address

OK this one I basically believe, haha. Because this is the problem with Muse: the LLM is just too dumb to perform complex tasks effectively in many cases.

All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more of their time and crowding out these other activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.

And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.

Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t the prevalence of mental disorder and social isolation increasing? I would be curious to know what the author thinks is behind that broader background trend, if not the phones.

This is a very brief, high-level overview. It weirdly dives deep into some less-relevant topics and glosses over a LOT of things.

It is not irrelevant, but not terribly reliable either. The "Mathematics" in the title is self-evidently clickbait.

YMMV.

The short version: since late 2025, firmware updates have made Tapo devices refuse third-party clients unless you turn on a "Third-Party Compatibility" switch in the Tapo app. The switch works by bringing back the older login, KLAP. With it off, devices speak an undocumented protocol called TPAP, which logs in with SPAKE2+ (RFC 9383). The library now speaks TPAP, so the switch can stay off.

The part I found most interesting is the security difference. A recorded KLAP login can be used to test password guesses offline. With SPAKE2+ it can't, and learning the password later doesn't decrypt sessions captured earlier. So the "compatibility" switch is really a security downgrade, and TP-Link's own FAQ says enabling it "may reduce the security of your devices".

Not everything works with the switch off yet: some cameras, such as a C210 on firmware 1.5.2, still need it on.

Happy to answer questions about the protocol work or the library.

I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.

The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.

P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.

When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples. "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.

The actual reality is "the models work great until they don't". Not "the models don't work."

Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.

Them: "AI is not a dumb copying machine; it processes the work so it becomes a derived work; it's just like how a human learns things from existing works and produces new, authentic works."

Us: "Hey, AI is copying signatures!"

Them: "You should view AI as a dumb copying machine; AI is not organized like the human brain."

This is wonderful. I love that people are still using this!

I worked on iChat AV video. We also added 4-way video conferencing with H.264 support in 2004. Really did feel cutting edge back then. Lots of all-nighters in those days, hand-writing altivec and hand-optimizing h.264 to work on iMacs and iBooks that didn’t have simd..

Thank you all for your support! Many repositories like this one exist on GitHub, I tried to report in in the past, but I was completely ignored by Github / Microsoft. I feel pretty powerless here :( I tried to call them out publicly - https://x.com/photopeacom/status/2106877355738140875

This "PhotoSuite" thing got me a bit angry, since the author presented it as an original work, when I clearly see that such a project can be made from my "pp.js" file in two hours using Claude. Also, I believe that their README.md did not mention Photopea before I wrote my first comment there.

Thousands of people shared "PhotoSuite" on social media and nobody minded the fact that they don't know who the creator is. The creator is still offering it on their website as their original work: https://www.photosuite.app/

We live in interesting times. AI can (or will be able to) de-obfuscate every bit of code that was ever published, convert binaries to readable C++ and so on. So, in theory, AI models will train on the source code that we consider "closed-source" now, and will be able to recreate this software if asked. But it wouldn't be possible if a real person did not spend thousands of hours of their life to write that software years sooner.

I have always been excided to see people make AI create something new, what didn't exist before. But so far, I mostly saw only "approximations" of expensive software, when AI tries to recreate each feature and each button according to what it thinks it should do, or "forks", when AI takes the full code of something and tries to "bend" it to hide the similarity with the original work.

Javascript/Python is the best because there's so much code out there that the LLMs can train on, and LLMs can write lots of tests to make sure everything is correct. There's nothing to compile, so the LLM can iterate quickly.

Rust is the best because the LLM gets great feedback from the compiler because of its strong type system, and it can deal with the borrow checker for you.

Go is the best because it's a simpler language with a decent type system, and the LLM can reason about that well, and will never forget to check an `err` return. The compiler is fast, so the LLM can iterate quickly.

I could write similar praise for C, C++, Java...

At this point I don't think any language is the best "because LLMs". I think there are quite a few languages that LLMs are probably not good at, but you have lots of choices if you want something they are good at.

Another example from Vermont's governor's office: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/vermont-80/email-metadata-55744...

Happy to help more but I'll probably be unavailable tonight.

[1] https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-...

Which it clearly wasn't, right? I mean, okay, in this case, the message did get reviewed by another person, but that's obviously an exceptional circumstance.

If I write something down on a piece of paper, and someone else goes through my garbage and finds it, is my note "communication made in a manner in which another person may view it"? It was clearly intended to be a private note!

"Debacle"? That was the most fun I've had on the Internet in years. When's the last time so many people engaged in so many arguments about materials science and electromagnetism? Sometime in the 1800s?

Why jump to regulation when just simple law enforcement would suffice. All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.

You first, sam.

I draw the line at paying them for the "service" they're "providing".

Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.

It's cool that so many people are building useful tools with LLMs, but for the love of ones and zeroes, people! PLEASE write your README by hand, instead of handing it off to the LLM with no human involvement! You know how unreadable LLM prose is! Why do you make that the first thing people see when they see your repo?

Until that happens, no. Sam Altman is here telling us to accept the cruelty of his actions and his company so that he can be more wealthy.